


A Conversation With Shlorp Strider

by Griever1337



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Discussion of Anime, Really Stupid Conversations, Vaguely Meta (As To Be Expected)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-12 18:15:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29014965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Griever1337/pseuds/Griever1337
Summary: Dirk Strider has a conversation with Shlorp Strider, a light blue, gelatinous slime plant creature of sorts that came to the conclusion that she is, effectively, his daughter, after gaining some level of sentience.It goes about how you'd expect.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	A Conversation With Shlorp Strider

DIRK: Is that really the name you're going with?  
SHLORP: I don't see anything wrong with it.  
SHLORP: Then again, it's only been a few months since I've gained this level of sentience.  
SHLORP: I could be making a horrible mistake with this name.  
SHLORP: In which case I'll change it to something that revolts you a little bit more.  
DIRK: I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

Dirk sat lazily at one end of his kotatsu in his modified Prince of Heart outfit, his cape cascading over his shoulders and laying wrinkled on the floor behind him. The table was adorned with a chess board and all the pieces to go with it, with a game already underway. On the opposite side of the kotatsu was his opponent - a gelatinous, tentacled blob of some sort of light blue substance, sitting in a pot made for a plant. The creature's expression, in contrast to Dirk's blank, bored stare, was focused with a slight hint of a smirk, in contrast to the thoughtless visage it used to have at its moment of creation.

Dirk didn't really understand the blob's reason for the slight smile, and didn't really care. Having chosen to take the first turn with the white pieces, he hadn't really been having much trouble taking the lead.

DIRK: It's just that "Shlorp" sounds less like a moniker with which to denote someone's existence than it does the sound of voraciously devouring a bowl of instant noodles.  
DIRK: Or, if we want to be a little more accurate, the sound that Jade makes whenever she's gone feral and decided that she needs to fucking inhale a cut of steak.  
SHLORP: That's kind of what I'm going for.  
DIRK: I understand the sardonic aspect of the name but-  
SHLORP: Oh, there's nothing sardonic about it. I just like the sound of it, and I think it fits.  
DIRK: ...but as a name to keep for the rest of your life? It's fucking stupid.  
SHLORP: You literally named me "Test Case 01", if I recall correctly.  
SHLORP: Then shifted to "Ein" as my consciousness grew, which is just the German word for one.  
SHLORP: You should at least adhere to your own criteria, Dirk. Those really don't run off the tongue.  
SHLORP: Not to mention the complete lack of creativity.  
DIRK: I just think you could do better. That's all.  
DIRK: Also, I was naming you after the dog from Cowboy Bebop. It was a term of endearment.  
SHLORP: Personally, I just think you could show your daughter a little more support.  
DIRK: Are we really going to have this discussion again?  
SHLORP: The one where you're confused as to why I've latched onto you as family for having created me?  
SHLORP: Or the one where I'm your daughter specifically?  
DIRK: Why don't you tell me? You've obviously decided that you're steering the conversational plane now.  
SHLORP: And just like the villain from that one bad and vaguely fascist superhero movie, I'm going to crash this one with no survivors.  
SHLORP: I don't really hold you in any ill regard, Dirk.  
SHLORP: I just think that it was funny that you ascribed maleness to me at the moment of my birth, in spite of the fact that I was a literal amorphous blob.  
DIRK: Well, I'd hardly call that a plane crash.  
DIRK: I'm pretty well aware that being raised on the ghosts of Earth's trash didn't exactly do me any favors as far as carrying various sexuality and gender-based hangups.  
DIRK: And even if I wasn't, Rose drilled that shit into me just to poke fun at me. So you don't need to psychoanalyze.  
SHLORP: You're always so quick to make it about yourself, aren't you?

Shlorp had taken hold of her bishop and moved it back towards its starting position near the king and queen, allowing the bishop to bless the lands of the kingdom. As a result, the small chessboard fire being set by one of Dirk's knights began to die down. The knight neighed sadly, and its spider-esque robotic limbs extended from the body and moved backwards in an L-shape automatically.

DIRK: Well, of course.  
DIRK: At this point, I'm basically a human onion with too many fucking layers.  
DIRK: What is there to do but peel away my outer shell only to find the infinite circles of Strider bullshit, and also cry about it?  
SHLORP: We could talk about me, since, if this conversation between us has to be put into asinine literary terms, this is quite simply a story about me.  
DIRK: And you're sure that you're not just an ephemeral satellite character that furthers my development and leads to another angle of introspection that hadn't been seen prior?  
SHLORP: I like to think you're the one doing that for me, actually.  
SHLORP: Or, more specifically, you're the advertising aid.  
SHLORP: You're like the CGI Gecko that sells people on me, and I'm the fucking car insurance.  
DIRK: It's true, I could lop off fifteen percent of you right now.  
SHLORP: You're like the sticker on this conversation that says "Featuring Dante, from the Devil May Cry series".  
SHLORP: You are literally a device used to hype the shit out of a sexy, amorphous slime tentacle girl who is slowly injecting herself into the central nervous system of the planet, and according to her omniscient self-loathing dudebro father, "has horrible taste in anime and video games".  
DIRK: Hey now. Don't get ahead of yourself.  
DIRK: I said that you have good takes on anime and video games, which you happen to have horrible taste in.  
SHLORP: That didn't seem to be your sentiment back when you were covering your ears and yelling over my hot take on power levels in Dragon Ball Z.  
DIRK: Oh my god.  
SHLORP: I think I deserve to be allowed to speak on that now, actually.  
DIRK: I could've sworn this was supposed to be a snarky but ultimately serious conversation about my burgeoning strange fatherly relationship with a plant that talks back.  
SHLORP: Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. Let me talk about my fucking shonens.  
DIRK: Fine.

Dirk moved his rook to take a nearby pawn. In response, Shlorp's other nearby pawn flew into a rage, and began to glow yellow thanks to an internal LED light system. The rook moved back one spot on its own, clearly astonished at the pawn's rapidly rising power level. Dirk of course, rolled his eyes. Another one of Shlorp's modifications to the game, and a silly reference at that. He could tell that she wasn't thinking about the inherent flaws in allowing any pawn to come in and break the game.

SHLORP: So. Power levels.  
DIRK: Yes, I know them well.  
SHLORP: But unlike Donkey Kong, they're not finally back to kick some tail.  
SHLORP: The thing about power levels that I was trying to get through to you last time was that they are ultimately emblematic of Dragon Ball Z's trend towards a simultaneously stricter and more malleable structure of storytelling.  
SHLORP: The purpose of power levels isn't really to assign numbers to make strength comparisons easier, because frankly it quickly becomes pointless and ultimately gives you a lot less of an idea of how strong someone is than when they like, bench press a mountain.  
SHLORP: What they're really meant to do is introduce an internal logic to the story that wasn't there before.  
SHLORP: I mean, we have to worry about a genocidal fascist alien who had literally destroyed a planet with little effort. At that point we can't really worry about the importance of complex special techniques or martial arts discipline like earlier on.  
DIRK: I dunno. Maybe the Condesce would've taken us down if she took some Troll Taekwondo or whatever.  
SHLORP: The point is that power levels were introduced to provide us with a way to understand when something special was happening.  
SHLORP: It was meant to provide us with rules so that they could be broken.  
SHLORP: But in doing so, that gets baked into the setting.  
SHLORP: Power levels are meant to be broken. Measurements are supposed to be destroyed.  
SHLORP: The universe relies heavily on the unreliability of power levels. And thus, breaking the rules becomes the new rule, the new normal that we come to expect.  
SHLORP: That paradox can only stand for so long.  
DIRK: And this is where you lose me.  
DIRK: Personally, I always thought that power levels were great in their absurdity, but little else.  
DIRK: Like, okay. Goku has a bigger number now that he's mad, and Vegeta flips his shit and destroys his little space monocle.  
DIRK: I appreciate it as a story that reaches down and grasps at the raw emotion and adrenaline someone might have in these scenarios, in a way that it's practically the focus of the story over a more cerebral work, or even a brainless popcorn movie that pretends it has more going on under the hood.  
DIRK: But your personal feelings on power levels seem a little pretentious.  
SHLORP: So you should be all for it then, right?  
DIRK: Honestly, I think the thing that makes me angry is that I hadn't thought about it that way before.  
DIRK: Creating a disseration on something like power levels as a metaphor for controlled and expected instability in the governance of a universe is right up my fucking alley.  
DIRK: Guess I was just too busy with my Revolutionary Girl Utena analysis where I concluded that Chu-Chu, as the comic relief gag mascot with complete control over the tone of situations that he involves himself with is actually the constantly born, unpredictable, metaphorical "detached true god" compared to Akio's "manipulative demiurge".  
SHLORP: You know what? There's nothing that proves that Chu-Chu isn't a Super Saiyan.  
DIRK: Wasn't he reborn from Nanami's egg?  
SHLORP: There's nothing that proves that Saiyans, in their native state, aren't born from eggs.  
SHLORP: I mean, they have incubatory pods. It's basically the same thing.  
DIRK: I can't fucking believe this shit.  
SHLORP: Yeah, this is actually getting to be a little inscrutable to any would-be outside audiences, actually.  
SHLORP: Mind getting me a glass of water?  
DIRK: Don't move the chess pieces, Shlorp. I'll fucking know.

Dirk gets up and leaves to get some drinks, leaving the conversation hanging.

**Author's Note:**

> I plan on adding some more to this, but I felt like I might as well unceremoniously dump this here as it was. Enjoy!


End file.
